Inspections will hit target, says Ofsted

In its report, Early Years: Early Days, published last week, Ofsted said that in the Directorate's first year of operation it had completed 51,300 transitional inspections. The Directorate also received 28,000 new applications for registration and, of these, just over half (15,000 or 54 per cent) had received a registration visit from an Ofsted inspector.

However, the report acknowledged that the transfer of police checks on early years workers to the Criminal Records Bureau had caused 'teething problems' and 'initially led to delays in returning checks which slowed down Ofsted's registration process'. But the report praised the CRB for being helpful in fast-tracking checks for staff for holiday playschemes, which enabled the majority of schemes to be registered and processed in time for the summer holidays.

Further difficulties resulted from transferring the registration of daycare provision from local authorities to Ofsted, which saw more than 1,400 local authority staff move to the Early Years Directorate, where they joined 900 new staff. Data on about 105,000 childcare providers and 300,000 closed files of former childcarers no longer operating were also transferred to Ofsted to enable it to start creating the first-ever national database of daycare providers and childminders in England.

The report added, 'In view of the scale of operation some difficulties have been experienced in uploading information from different sources to the national database and in validating this against the manual records transferred from local authorities.' It had also investigated around 6,000 complaints about childcare providers from the public, most of which related to the organisation and safety of the setting.

Ofsted said that during the period of transition from September 2001 to next March it would ensure that all childcare providers were inspected by its 900 inspectors 'at least once'. It also promised that by the end of the transitional period, 70 per cent of applications to register new childcare providers would be completed within 25 weeks for full-day care and 12 weeks for childminders and other types of daycare, and that 70 per cent of investigations into allegations or concerns about childcare provision would be completed within 30 working days.

Early years organisations praised the work the Early Years Directorate had done in its first year of operation. Eva Lloyd, chief executive of the National Early Years Network, said, 'Ofsted should be congratulated for having done an amazing job under virtually impossible circumstances.

'But it is alarming that only 54 per cent of new applications for registration have been visited. This highlights the enormous job that Ofsted has been given to do. If we are to protect the quality of provision for young children, Ofsted needs all the support it can get.'

Gill Haynes, chief executive of the National Childminding Association, added, 'We are pleased to see that the report sets targets for 70 per cent of childminders to be registered within 12 weeks. This is absolutely vital if we are to meet the Government target for the number of childminding places.'

The report is on the Ofsted website at www.ofsted.gov.uk.